Seòmar agus comataidhean

Just a small one for a Tuesday morning.

For context, I point out that it was just in the past 24 hours that the psychological therapy staff member to whom I referred was in touch about staff having to work unpaid hours because they are so concerned about patients.

I am slightly concerned about what we will do until the new staff who have been recruited are actually in post, given the lag that often comes with recruitment. I think that your submission mentioned 12 weeks, in that regard.

According to the submissions, all the boards that are represented have been escalated to higher levels of the framework, and they all have higher turnover than the national average. Is the high level of turnover linked to poor culture in your board areas?

Everyone else will talk about buildings and things like that, but I want to talk about the social infrastructure that we need for people to be able to have time to be active. That relates to Kate Joester’s point that, if a person is trying to drop kids off at school, do the shopping and come back, when will they actually have time to take a meaningful walk, go for a cycle or participate in a class in a local authority setting.

Not everybody might have an answer from their working experience, but I wonder whether anyone can reflect on what changes we need to make. For example, the Green Party is a big advocate of the four-day working week, which would allow people more time to focus on things that are important to them. We also need to look at caring time. Does anyone have thoughts on the social infrastructure that we need to facilitate women and girls having time to take care of themselves?

I will be first every time to stand up and say that those are good careers and that that is not the reality in every single department in every single hospital. However, I think that when staff are telling us about the conditions we must address them and ensure that workplaces are supportive for absolutely everyone.

For my supplementary, I want to go back to Cathie Cowan, given that NHS Forth Valley was escalated on the basis of its culture. I spoke to a number of staff members before escalation; they all told me that senior management were remote from the workforce and were rarely seen. When five respiratory consultants resigned, they all cited the toxic culture as a reason. Since the escalation, psychological therapy staff have been in touch and have said that because of the two-year waits they are so worried about patients that they are working unpaid hours. What is being done to acknowledge the culture that staff have been working under, and how will the situation be sorted? We seem to be talking about three or four departments in NHS Forth Valley alone.

My question on this theme has been adequately covered so, in the interest of time, you can move on, convener.

You mentioned changing facilities. What else do you think could be done to improve facilities? Some activities in Falkirk, for example, take place in the high schools after the school day has finished, so the lights are often off in the rest of the school, and it is quite an oppressive environment to walk into when it is mostly in the dark. Are there any other examples of ways that we could make the buildings better for women to participate?

To what extent are you sympathetic to extending the PSC’s remit to include acting as the voice of staff? Do you agree that widening the remit could enable the PSC to get a clearer picture of patient safety concerns, given the different ways in which such concerns are raised, or do you think that it would risk adding duplication or potentially streamlining the remit across all those different ways?

Paul Sweeney was just talking about exercise being seen as a punishment and how, with influencers and so on, we do not want that to become a thing for young women and teenage girls. However, there is still the older cohort of young women for whom, in the early noughties and so on, that was the reality of physical exercise and activity. Many of us shied away from exercise and organised team sport for those punishment-related reasons. Many of those women will now feel that they should know what physical activity and sport they enjoy doing.

How can we reverse that damage and give that age group opportunities—without stigma—to come back to physical activity and take up new things of the sort that they shied away from when they were younger?

Given that, as you have just mentioned, minister, the remit is slightly wider than that of the Patient Safety Commissioner for England, do you have any concerns about duplications on the medicine side of things and between the roles of the two commissioners? Do you think that the role for the new commissioner for Scotland is realistic, given its breadth and potential workload?